Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 15 i Vantage

IT WAS WITH much sadness that we learned of the death in August of Jack Sears at the age of 86. Having reunited Jack with his ex-Tommy Sopwith DB4 GT just ten months ago (issue 13) the news of his passing was especially affecting. Jack will forever be known as the first winner of the British Touring Car Championship in 1958, but the manner of his victory was extraordinary, as he told me when we met at Snetterton. Sears, in an Austin 105, had the same number of points as Tommy Sopwith in his Jaguar at the end of the season. So after the final round it was decreed that the title would be decided by a two-man shootout at Brands Hatch: two five-lap sprints in two identical Riley 1.5s.…

THE INTERNATIONAL Dinner and Spring Concours held at the Imperial War Museum Duxford in May was ‘the best in the Club’s history,’ according to AMOC deputy chairman and Concours organiser Mark Donoghue. The weekend’s events, attended by Club president Viscountess Diana Downe, attracted a record number of members from all over the world – some from as far away as Australia – and more Concours entries than ever before. The Saturday evening dinner and champagne reception was held under the wings of the British pre-production Concorde. Members were treated to a demonstration of the plane’s famous nose-droop by Duxford Aviation Society volunteers and an insightful and humorous talk by former Concorde Captain John Hutchinson. With an Aston Martin Vulcan parked alongside the famous Avro Vulcan bomber, and a Spitfire and…

Cut off its nose? Thanks for a great magazine. My reason for writing is to encourage Simon Draper not to cut the nose off his DB4 GT Zagato! [In issue 13, Aston collector Draper told Vantage he was considering having the front of the car returned to its original shape, even though it has had its present nose ever since a racing accident at Goodwood in 1963.] For me it is part of its racing history and makes it more special. I understand the argument for returning the nose to its original shape, but it would be a replica part with no historical value. There was a similar example of cutting the nose off a car: the Ferrari 375 MM chassis 0320AM from 1953 had open headlights originally and raced…

Flight of fantasy, or deliverable dream? It would be very easy to dismiss the AM-RB 001 as the former, were it not for the fact that this remarkable, convention-challenging hypercar is the brainchild of Adrian Newey. As the world’s most successful – and therefore revered – designer of Grand Prix racing cars, Newey wields immense power. Both creatively and financially, for his name carries unique gravitas in the world of fast cars. Put succinctly, if Aston Martin is The Brand, Newey is most definitely The Man. This much is clear when we arrive at Gaydon for the unveiling of a full-scale model of the car. It’s appropriate for an Aston Martin quite unlike any other that the event itself is equally fresh and unconventional. Outside the main building, a DJ…

THE UPLIFTINGLY-NAMED A1, Italy’s sun-baked ‘spinal’ autostrada that runs the 754km from Naples in the south, via Tuscany, to the Emilian plains and Milan in the north, is a tedious thing this Friday afternoon, a perfect storm of stifling mid-summer heat and arterial atrophy. For as far as photographer Max Earey’s lens can see, thousands of barely moving vehicles map out our temporally locked future in orderly parallel lines that dissolve to a hazy ripple on the horizon. We’re trapped in a slowly shunting train of metal longer even than those I remember making as a kid during my monthly stock-take of scuffed and flaking Corgi toys. And you know how memories have a tendency to exaggerate. An old boss of mine once wrote a line about a moment in…

Racing driver, secret agent, Aston fancier... St John Ratcliffe Stewart Horsfall, known to most as Jock, could almost have been a James Bond with a racing licence. And he even knew Bond author Ian Fleming, when the two of them were involved in a remarkable wartime counter-intelligence stunt. We’ll get to that – but first, what is the Aston Martin connection that makes Horsfall a Hero? It’s strong enough for the Aston Martin Owners Club to have held the St John Horsfall Memorial Trophy race at Silverstone every year since 1950, marking the talents of a fearless racing driver, majoring on Aston Martins apart from his final, fateful race in Silverstone’s 1949 International Trophy. As well as racing them, Horsfall engineered them after returning to civilian life post-war. He worked…

YOU MIGHT HAVE expected the most successful DB model in Aston Martin’s history to have received something of a send-off when it ceased production, but instead it received the most modest of farewells. In fact, the first anyone knew that the last DB9 had rolled off the production line (in July, if you’re curious) was news that Q by Aston Martin had built a very special run of ‘Last of 9’ limited editions. No prizes for guessing how many were built. This special run of cars comes at the end of a glittering production run of almost 13 years, during which time more than 16,500 examples have been built at Gaydon. Its evolution has been slow and sympathetic, as much due to the intrinsic rightness of the original design as…

THANKS TO the two-part nature of the World Endurance Championship (WEC) season, at the time of going to press there had been only one race since Le Mans in mid-June: the 6 Hours of Nürburgring held at the end of July. Using the modern Grand Prix circuit that flanks the gnarly old Nordschleife, the 6 Hours of Nürburgring is the home race for the German LMP1 teams of Audi and Porsche – and Toyota, too, as the team is actually based in Cologne – so attracts big crowds. The racing tends to be good, too; the circuit’s undulating nature and challenging combination of fast corners and technical twists fostering wheel-towheel action, while the Eifel region’s notoriously fickle weather adds unpredictability that keeps teams and drivers on their toes. For Aston…

IN THE EXPECTATION that you are as tired of hearing about Brexit as we are, we’ll keep this bit brief: yes, the UK’s surprising decision to leave the EU has had an impact on the classic car trade. At Artcurial’s Le Mans sale in July, general manager Matthieu Lamoure lamented the absence of collectors from across the Channel, whose Great British Pounds no longer look very great at all. The weakness of our currency is certain to have dampened the enthusiasm of Brits who might ordinarily have considered buying from Europe or the US; equally it makes UK-based cars attractive to buyers from other parts of the world. If you think you can quantify the impact of the ‘Leave’ vote precisely, though, YouGov has got a job for you… Even…

If there’s a genre of car guaranteed to get the juices flowing, it’s the hardcore road-racer. Fierce, focused and simmering with aggression, a trackready road car is catnip to those of us who are suckers for cars with a wilder side. Of course, Aston Martin is no stranger to this breed. Indeed there’s a compelling argument that says the DB4 GT and its Zagato-penned evolution remain the finest and most covetable examples of all. In more recent years, too, Aston has dabbled with harder, faster versions of its series production cars – models like the N400, N420 and N430 Vantage, to name a few. These cars were in part informed by the marque’s competition efforts at the Nürburgring and the close-to-production GT4 racer that those activities spawned. But Aston Martin…

The fact that you’re reading this magazine suggests you’re a car enthusiast, so there’s a good chance you’ll have attended a race meeting or two. But have you ever stopped to consider what goes into making such an event happen: the planning, the logistics, the supporting cast? I’ll be honest, beyond noticing the marshals in their boiler suits and being dimly aware of drivers’ briefings, I haven’t. Until now. It’s late July and I’m on my way to Snetterton in Norfolk to look behind the scenes of an Aston Martin Owners Club race meeting. It’s Friday, the day before race day, so the ideal opportunity to chat to everyone from drivers to mechanics to marshals to medics before battle commences. And not forgetting the clerk of the course. Not someone…

‘YOU’LL NOT FIND IT quite as shiny and clean in here as some of the places you’ve visited…’ Bodylines boss Alan Pointer is leading us into the first of the two adjoining units that are the heart of his company. ‘It’s a proper workshop,’ he chuckles. ‘Dirty, noisy and dusty.’ He’s not wrong about the noise. Later, when I play back the recording of our chat, whole chunks of conversation are drowned out by a chorus of hammering, filing and grinding. Especially hammering. ‘Noise is money for us,’ he grins. And, presumably, where’s there’s muck there’s brass. When we retreat to his office, I can’t help noticing that several of the chairs have seen better days, their foam innards poking through worn plastic trim… Of course, this is the way…

THERE HAS ALWAYS been something bewitching about the V12 Vantage. Doubtless it has everything to do with squeezing the biggest engine into the smallest model. And, as we know, the GT12 is the maddest, baddest V12 Vantage ever built. So when Q by Aston Martin undertook a very (very) special one-off commission to create a roadster version of the GT12, is it any wonder we all went weak at the knees? Just to recap, the GT12 coupé was inspired by Aston Martin Racing’s V12-engined GT3 racer. It took the already mighty V12 Vantage S and honed it to the keenest possible edge. Carbonfibre bodywork with bulges in all the right places stretched to conceal wide-track suspension, while an ultra-aggressive aerodynamic package pinned the lighter, more powerful machine to the road.…

NOT MANY companies get to celebrate their 40th birthday, but pre-war Aston Martin specialist Ecurie Bertelli did just that in July, the occasion marked by a superb gathering of early Astons from all over the UK and further afield. No fewer than 67 cars descended on the company’s headquarters at Olney in Buckinghamshire to help celebrate the landmark, travelling from as far as Poland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Given that Aston Martin built just 599 cars between 1915 and 1939 – and only 450 are still in use – it was a remarkable turn-out. The cars included such unique early-20s Astons as ‘Buzzbox’, ‘Razor Blade’ ‘Monoposto’ and A3, along with a number of team cars and the first and last Ulsters. Guests included musician and racer Nick Mason, who came…

YEARS ENDING in even numbers are now the best – and the most hectic – for followers of classic motorsport, with the advent of not just the Monaco Historic but also the fabulous Le Mans Classic. And in between these prestigious events, the UK club racing scene remains buoyant. In June, the AMOC combined with the British GT Championship meeting at Silverstone, using the full Grand Prix circuit, which certainly stretched the legs of the older Astons. The Intermarque race attracted no fewer than four DB4 lightweights, with Nicholas King the first home. Meanwhile the hotly contested Aston Martin GT Challenge was won by Tom Black’s GT4 from Chris Kemp’s similar car by just half a second after 42 minutes of racing. The second weekend of July was blessed with…

WE HAVE BEEN thwarted again in our attempts to bring you the most up-todate market news, with the annual Monterey Car Week auctions falling squarely between our deadline and our on-sale date. It’s almost as if the organisers had more important things to worry about than this column when drawing up the event schedule… The results will be in by the time this issue of Vantage reaches you, then, but it is nonetheless worth highlighting one of the more special Astons set to be offered in California: a 1954 DB2/4 Spider by Bertone. Snaffled by Gooding & Co ahead of the company’s biggest sale of the year, at Pebble Beach, it is one of five Bertonebodied DB2/4s commissioned by American businessman Stanley Arnolt in 1953, and the only one of…

PICTURE-PERFECT CLOUDS scudded across the Northamptonshire countryside and the fields exuded a vivid green, the likes of which had not been seen for weeks. This was to be a day of heightened senses. The destination was Donington Park for a rendezvous with a very special type of DB9 – the first of the DBRS9 line of privateer racing cars. As an unabashed fan of the ‘gentleman’s racer’, I’d been looking forward to this day for a very long time. On paper at least, the DBRS9 was a close relative of the regular DB9 road car, certainly much closer than the fire-breathing DBR9. Which is why I’m driving to the circuit in a DB9 GT, the final incarnation of the DB9 line, the ‘last of the many’ going to meet the…

THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons why you might be drawn to a DB MkIII. The DB name, for starters: the line of road cars that started with the DB2 in 1950 was the first enduring legacy of the David Brown era, and the MkIII – launched in 1957 – was the fastest and most refined of these ‘Feltham cars’. It’s practical, too, with its occasional rear seats and hatchback tail, and it’s a proper sports car, with racing in its bloodline (DB2s appeared several times at Le Mans). Fact is, in the late ’50s the MkIII was every bit as desirable as the DB4 that everyone goes gaga for today, and yet you can pick one up now for half the cost of a comparable ’4. The fact it’s not…